Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Aveparthe - Landscapes Over The Sea

Cryo Chamber: 2014

Time for my favorite type of dark ambient, that which gets geographical up in the house. Looks like this one’s got it all: cool coast lines, groovy ground carved by glacial processes, fluvial flows, probably all hanging out in some northern fjord too. Man, fjords are just awesome, all wavy and curvy and shit. They add so much coastal perimeter to your nation, several hundred or even thousands of kilometres of traversable landmass, all with impossibly steep hillsides plunging strait down into the deep black of cold oceans. Sure, the Oregon Coast may have some nifty dunes and eroded lumps of large rocks dotting its path, but there’s so little of it in total. Vancouver Island’s many fjords easily give the region a complete advantage in eroded lumps of large rocks. Look, it’s important for the lucrative postcard and wallpaper trades!

Okay, enough of the silly. While it’s true the concept of ‘untamed wasteland drone’ does appeal to me, it’s more for that sense of urban displacement than any sort of geographical porn. As with dark ambient focusing on deep space, there’s something captivating about unshackling your psyche from any and all human influence, losing oneself in the desolate emptiness of your surroundings. All from the comfort of my home, that is. Sure, I could make the actual trek to the Yukon tundra or alpine snows of the Coastal Mountains if I wanted a true isolation experience, but I like having a choice of six sushi restaurants within walking distance too.

The group Aveparthe hails from a fairly remote region of the world though, so they have some inkling of what it’s like having few ties to civilization at large. While info on Sádon is scarce, not so is the case with the other portion of this project, the charmingly named Astral & Shit (Ivan Gozikov). Hailing from the Russian city of Nevyansk, an administrative town on the eastern side of the Ural range, Mr. Gozikov has idled his time away making copious amounts of experimental noise and drone pieces under the A&S guise, some eighty-plus releases in the past half-decade alone. Throw in an additional eighty-plus releases as Demiurge Urizen, and you’ve got one ridiculously prolific producer. How nice of him to make time to collaborate with ol’ Sádon for a new project like Aveparthe.

Landscapes Over The Sea is their debut, on Cryo Chamber and in general. It consists of five tracks, two lengthy pieces breaching the seventeen minute mark (Nimbostratus, Full Of Sun), two shorter compositions running about three-and-a-half (Fog Machine, 1600), and a final eight minute track titled Turn. These are all straight-forward as far as ambient drone goes, growing and escalating with layers of pads, synths, field recordings, reverb, and timbre. There’s an ethereal quality to them all, especially Full Of Sun which utilizes chants as well. 1600 has a sparse tone going for it, Fog Machine obscures distant sounds, while Turn comparitively sounds luminous. Quite an abrupt ending though. Floating Points would approve.